‘You think this is bad,’ I told the reflection in the bathroom mirror. ‘You should see the other guy.’

When I got out of the shower I rolled my shoulders and stretched my neck. I felt better, but there was still a stone in my chest when I thought of Lesley. Some things aren’t fixed by a couple of hours of primal screaming – or whatever that was I’d been doing the night before.

It was Day 7 – Hannah and Nicole were still missing.

Me-time was over. There was work to be done.

Proactive Measures

8

Proactive Measures

First question to ask yourself is – what are you good for? West Mercia Police didn’t need me to beat the bushes because they had everyone from Grampian Search and Rescue to the SAS doing that. They didn’t need me holding the hands of the parents, even though I bet DS Cole would have paid me quite a lot of money to do so, and they really didn’t need me handling the media. What I was was the only Falcon-qualified officer in the area and, along with my specialist civilian support, i.e. Beverley, I was best deployed concentrating on my area of expertise.

The second question to ask yourself is – what the fuck do I do next? Since weird shit was what I was there for, I decided I should work on the assumption that weird shit was what had happened.

We knew that the girls had got up, dressed themselves, and left their separate homes under their own steam. There was no sign of forced entry, and I hadn’t detected vestigia in their rooms. Assume they were lured out, or possibly one was lured out and then lured the other one out. Assume the luring was done by something supernatural and in trots suspect number one – Princess Luna. Invisible horse-shaped friend, possibly a unicorn, possibly only visible in moonlight – the physics of which I didn’t even want to think about.

Closest Princess Luna sighting to the village was at Hannah’s birthday party, so stick a virtual pin in the field behind the village hall. Assume the girls go gambolling after My Invisible Pony – following the moon, which had been in its first quarter that night. They wouldn’t have walked on the roads, not least because of the danger of being run over by alfresco sex maniacs and, besides, Dominic said that village kids went across the fields – and their paths were not necessarily the ones that were marked on the OS map.

So, up by paths unseen to Whiteway Head – although it must have been a reasonably direct route if the timings were going to make any sense – where something definitely magical happened, and blew both their phones.

Now, I reckoned that they’d met a third party there, perhaps a friend of Princess Luna or maybe an owner, and that would be the point where the girls’ fun-filled frolic went sour.